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4 Essential WordPress Plugins for SEO Success

With nearly 50,000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory and thousands more on 3rd party sites, it can be extremely difficult to know where to start when looking for plugins to improve the SEO performance of your site.

Big lists of ten or 20 WordPress plugins are not very helpful and will probably make things more confusing for you by giving you so many options, and the truth is, you don’t need that many plugins to give yourself a solid SEO foundation in WordPress!

Here are the four SEO plugins that I use on every single WordPress site I own and work on:

1. Yoast SEO

Simply put, this is the most comprehensive SEO plugin for WordPress. While I’m not a fan of the recent design changes and new setup wizard (although, I can see how the setup wizard would be beneficial to novice SEOs), all of the previous functionality is still there which made Yoast my favorite SEO plugin.

Notable features of Yoast SEO include:

Titles and Metas – This section allows you to force rewrite titles (individually adjust title and meta description at the page level) and allows you to noindex different post types, taxonomies, archives, and subpages. You’ll also find settings for the meta keywords tag (which have long been obsolete), and keep search engines from using DMOZ and Yahoo directory listings to automatically populate meta information in search results. You can also set default templates for post and page titles, categories, and author archives.

Social Settings – This section makes it easy to administer Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards meta data on your website. One of the most valuable things from this section may be the ability to see Facebook insights from within your WordPress dashboard.

Sitemaps – The Yoast SEO plugin has a built in XML sitemap generator with a comprehensive list of options. You can easily select which categories and taxonomies you want to include or exclude from your XML sitemap. You can also exclude single pages or posts here, but that is more easily done when editing individual pages/posts.

Advanced – Here you can adjust breadcrumb settings and taxonomies for different posts and categories. You can strip /category/ from your WordPress category URLs and redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL, if required.

Tools – This section allows you to directly accesses your .htaccess and robots.txt files to perform a number of rewrite and redirect functions. You can also access the ‘Bulk editor’ here, where you can make bulk changes to page titles and meta descriptions without having to access the edit page. This is a very handy feature when you have a lot of changes to make.

Search Console – One of the best features of the Yoast SEO plugin is it’s integration with Google Search Console. You can quickly view errors and mark them as resolved from within your WordPress dashboard.

The other great feature of the Yoast SEO plugin is the SERP Snippet Preview box in the page/post editor where you can edit your page title and meta description and see exactly how they would appear in the SERPs:

Yoast also have a range of premium SEO plugins. The best feature of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin is the redirect manager. However, to me, this feature is not worth the $69 fee for a single site licence and I choose to manage redirects with the Quick Page Post Redirects plugin (mentioned below).

I use Yoast’s News SEO for WordPress plugin on websites that have been accepted into Google News. This plugin makes managing your Google News site a breeze and I highly recommend it over the many free news SEO plugins out there.

The W3 Total Cache plugin aims to improve user experience and organic performance by reducing the time it takes to download a web page. This is done by storing elements on the on the user’s computer, so when they go from page to page they don’t have to “re-download” things they’ve already downloaded.

Minify – When you’re adding multiple plugins and/or working with a premium theme you run into the problem of there being too many style sheets. Minify combines the style rules onto fewer sheets, meaning fewer requests need to be made to your server.

DataBase Cache – Since page and post content is stored in MySQL databases, it’s smart to optimize their performance with this feature.

CDN – Integrates with whatever Content Delivery Network you use. If you have a media-heavy website, it is highly recommended using a 3rd party to host the files.

Browser caching is by no means a new concept. This plugin makes it easy to administer caching from within the backend of WordPress.

3. Quick Page Post Redirects

Managing and implementing redirects is an important part of SEO. This can be done without FTP access through the .htaccess file editor in Yoast SEO, however, it requires a certain level of coding knowledge and you run the risk of making your site inaccessible to everyone if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Instead of having to make manual edits in your .htaccess file, the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin allows you to add and manage redirects from within the WordPress back end. This plugin has a range of features that make it one of the most comprehensive redirect plugins available for WordPress.

Notable features of Quick Page/Post Redirects include:

Master Override Options – Allows you to set master options for that turn off all redirects, make all redirects “nofollow”, open in new windows, and more.

Plugin Clean Up – This option will clean up (erase) all of the redirects you’ve previously set with the plugin.

Quick Redirects – This performs basic manual redirect options where you specify the URL path and the target path. This is useful for implementing redirects then you discover broken links or you are looking to clean up canonical issues.

Redirect Summary – Gives an overview of all the URLs you’re redirecting using this plugin. The redirect summary will help you identify redirect chains and see how frequently each redirect is being hit.

4. WP Smush/WP Smush Pro

Bulky images can be a huge contributing factor to poor pagespeed, which, as mentioned earlier in this article, is critically important in providing a good user experience and is also a major Google ranking factor.

Automatically Scale Images – Set maximum image heights and widths and larger images will be resized and compressed upon upload.

File Types – Process JPEG, GIF and PNG image files.

The free version is great, however, there are a few restrictions that you should be aware of, including being restricted to 50 with the number of files you process in bulk. If you have a large image library, this might be a problem. You will also be restricted to ‘smushing’ images that are 1MB or smaller. This shouldn’t be an issue because you should really never be uploading images that large to your website; it’s best to do some sort of compression and optimization before uploading images to your site.

No Bulk Smush Restrictions – Bulk smush your entire image library with the click of a button – a big time saver for large image libraries.

100+ Other Premium Plugins – The way WPMU DEV works is that you pay a monthly subscription to get access to their range of 100+ premium plugins, so get much, much more than just WP Smush Pro.

If you don’t want to fork out the monthly fee for the Pro version or think that you simply don’t need it on your smaller WordPress site, I still highly recommend using the free version. However, if you work on or own a lot of WordPress sites, I highly recommend the Pro version because you can install their plugins on an unlimited number of sites.

Conclusion

There you have it! My four most recommended and most used SEO plugins for WordPress. While these plugins may not necessarily give you a ‘big SEO boost’ after setting them up, they will help ensure you are setting yourself a solid foundation to build on with your amazing content!

Let me know what you think of this list; if you have any other plugins you think I should add, or what your favorite alternatives are!

I wouldn’t touch W3 Total Cache with a long pole. They were recently forced into an update due to a XSS vunerability in the plugin, the first update for months. We thought the plugin had been abandoned quite frankly and if you look around the support forums, so did many others.

WP Rocket would be our recommendation if you have some money to spend. Otherwise WP Super Cache by the team at Automattic and the Cache Enabler plugin by KeyCDN are both very decent and are simple to set up for most users. W3 Total Cache was always a PITA to configure, even for advanced users.

I agree with GPL Vault above, W3 Total Cache’ got vulnerabilities. Moreover, it requires patience to set it up properly and get it working without any errors. WP Rocket is the best caching solution for WordPress if you’ve got money to play with 🙂

W3 total cache is the best plugin i have ever used. But removing this plugin is little bit difficult as we have to delete advanced-cache.php, db.php, wp-total-cache-config.php and w3tc folder from our webserver . But overall good plugin

WordPress SEO by Yoast is a best free SEO plugin for WordPress. This single plugin takes care of many aspects of your WordPress blog’s SEO. Using SEO by Yoast you can do following things:

Add meta value for homepage
Add meta value for single post
All valuen for Social sharing (Image, title & description)
Social SEO
Create sitemap file
Edit robots.txt and .htaccess
Control indexing of your blog

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I’m using WP Rocket for cache, it is nice! and can even supporting in integration with Woocommerce and Cloudflare. Thank you GPL VAULT for your recommendation led to it’s research and successfully committed.